Level of Software Piracy Links to Intelligence

The recent research has found that software piracy is directly linked to intelligence level in the country. The study covered over 100 countries and its findings show that software piracy rates are lower in more intelligent nations.

While there are many reasons why people may turn to piracy, the most popular ones are financial motives and lack of legitimate alternatives. Now it turns out that national intelligence can also be one of those reasons.

The research titled “Intelligence and Crime: A novel evidence for software piracy” examines the link between national IQ scores and local software piracy rates. The analysis shows a trend indicating that countries with a higher IQ have lower software rates. There are also exceptions from this rule: for example, piracy rates and IQ are both relatively high in China, while in South Africa there are low national IQ and low piracy rates.

Nevertheless, the general trend shows a direct relation between a country’s IQ score and the local software piracy rates.

In an attempt to rule out the influence of external factors, the researchers carried out robustness tests with various variables including the strength of IP enforcement, political factors, and economic development.

The good news is that “dumb” countries are not “doomed”, because if the ruling elite is smart enough, they are able to lower piracy rates. The most interesting conclusion is that if these results hold up, software piracy may solve itself in the long run.

By the way, previous research revealed that software piracy increases literacy in African countries. This may raise the national IQ and consequently lower piracy rates. However, the suspicion is that lower software piracy may lower literacy again…

Alternatively, countries with higher IQs pirate a shitload more, however, due to their higher IQs, they are sophisticated enough not to make their piracy efforts so obvious and or easily detectable and thus make the stats and conclusions in this bs "study" complete and utter nonsense.